Algorithmic wizardry

Last week I wrote a short commentary on James Hague's blog post Organization skills beat algorithmic wizardry. This week that post got more traffic than my server could handle. I believe it struck a chord with experienced software developers who know that the challenges they face now are not like the challenges they prepared for in school.

Although I completely agree that "algorithmic wizardry" is over-rated in general, my personal experience has been a little different. My role on projects has frequently been to supply a little bit of algorithmic wizardry. I've often been asked to look into a program that is taking too long to run and been able to speed it up by an order of magnitude or two by improving a numerical algorithm. (See an example here.)

James Hague says that "rarely is there some " algorithm that casts a looming shadow over everything else." I believe he is right, though I've been called into projects precisely on those rare occasions when an algorithm does cast a shadow over everything else.